Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been blogging since September now, and I have to say I’ve enjoyed the process more than I thought I would. When I was first told that I had to blog every week for class (with rough minimum of 600 words a post) I was definitely a little apprehensive. I had never had a blog before, and I wasn’t really one for sharing my thoughts in such a public manner. The idea that someone I didn’t know at all, or even worse worked in a museum I wrote about, could be reading my words (and leaving a comment!) was kinda terrifying. Did I have something worth while to say? Would my opinion about an exhibition be seen as overly critical? This whole idea of blogging really wasn’t something I was comfortable with.

I’m honestly glad I stuck with it, however. After the first few posts, I (sort of) stopped caring what someone else would think about my post and just wrote what I was feeling at that time. As much as this blog was a requirement for one of my classes, this blog is also an opportunity for me to share my thoughts and experiences.

What I have also come to realize is that my goal to visit a different museum every week, was highly ambitious. Life (school, a part-time job, and having some time to myself) kinda of got in the way of traveling all over DC every week. That’s not to say that I didn’t want to see an exhibition every week, but it just didn’t always work out that way. That’s life though! I did get to learn about a lot of different types of museums and exhibitions, however, from all the reading and snooping around online to look for a weekly subject matter. Looking back on my past blogs, I wrote about research being done on conserving smells, the plethora of in-gallery technology, the representation of mud masons in Mali, and two different collecting strategies at major museums in the country. The world is doing so many cool and interesting things in the museum world that aren’t just about curating!

I definitely think that I will continue blogging in the future, because as I continue to explore DC I’m sure there is going to be a lot to talk about. It will probably happen less frequently than weekly, though, just because I want to write about things that really move me and inspire me (not just because it’s a part of my grade). Blogging has definitely become a part of my museum centered world, and for that, I am very grateful for my Museums and Digital Technology class.

Today I was reading an article by Alexandra Jacobs about two different exhibitions on fashion: one at the Henry Ford Museum outside of Detroit, Michigan and the other at the Costume Institute at the Met in New York. As the article outlines, the shows focus on two very different sections of America’s fashion history, thus highlighting two different collecting/curating techniques found in museums across the country. The Henry Ford Museum’s exhibition “American Style and Spirit”which displays the wardrobe of Augusta Roddis, a longtime advocate of education and daughter of a lumber mogul. In stark contrast, the Met just opened an exhibition entitled “Masterworks: Unpacking Fashion” which highlights extravagant and avant-garde works from the likes of Chanel, McQueen, and Versace. As Jacobs notes in her article, these shows are paradigms of two battling curatorial practices: “populist versus elite; contextualized versus abstracted; local versus global.”

As the Costume Institute’s curator, Andrew Bolton, makes clear, the collecting focus of the Met “prefers runway samples” because they “reflect the designer’s original intention.” This preference places the importance not on the people who actually wore the outfit, but rather the person who created it. Just as there is a canon in art, Mr. Bolton aims to elevate members of the fashion community into a similarly styled canon. This idea is readily seen in the recent shows at the Costume Institute such as “Manus x Machina” and even “China: Through the Looking Glass”. These exhibitions brought together works from a variety of eras and designers to discus larger themes, rather than tell the story of a single person. These shows also bring together blockbuster designers in order to create crowd appeal. “China: Through the Looking Glass” was the Met’s most popular exhibition in years in part because of its use of historic Chinese attire as a foil for contemporary high-fashion designs. The most recent shows at the Costume Institute scream of elitism because most people can only appreciate these intangible designs from an aesthetic perspective. There is very little relatable material at the Costume Institute exhibitions, and in many ways that is their appeal; these exhibitions are an escape from the every day into the extraordinary world of fashion gods like Anna Wintour. They are Vogue Editorials brought into the museum.

The Henry Ford Museum exhibition is the polar opposite. “American Style and Spirit” uses the wardrobe of Augusta Roddis as a means to discuss what America was like at the time. Instead of putting the visitors into an awestruck stupor, Jeannine Head Miller, the museum’s curator of domestic life, “wanted to bring people into the exhibit and not feel like they had to be fashionistas to enjoy it.” Much of Ms. Roddis’ wardrobe was made by anonymous dress makers, with only the patterns evidence of a dress’s creation. The focus of this exhibition, then, is on the story these clothes can tell, in collaboration with letters and receipts. While the Met and the Costume Institute focus on the garment and the creator, the Henry Ford Museum uses its fashion archive to tell another story about America’s past. There is a contextualization that does not appear in the theatrical shows on display in New York. But perhaps that’s okay.

Reading this article got me thinking more deeply about museums, both small and large, and their role in defining culture. If we looked solely at institutions such as the Met as the source of fashion culture and history, the only names that would be seen as important would be those featured heavily in their exhibitions. Mr. Brodrick has made it clear that his fashion preference is “designers who in a way make us think differently about fashion, who go beyond notions of wearability or functionality,” but what about the designers who don’t fit that mold? While the avant-garde designers are certainly making waves in fashion with their daring style, there are certainly designers worth noting who make clothes for the every day woman. If these clothes are not being collected as well, how will the exhibitions of the future look? Certainly, people cannot think that the Yves Saint Laurent dress made out of bird-of-paradise feathers was worn by every woman? Only time will tell.

What someone choses to collect tells a lot of about the collector, but also deeply influences how the past will be seen by generations to come. The Met, through their fashion archives, tells a very particular story about a very small subset of fashion throughout history. The Henry Ford Museum is attempting to tell a different story, one that contains some of the same high fashion names but also brings to light long-forgotten designers and stores. There are so many other stories out there, but it seems like no one is out there collecting them. Unfortunately, beginning to archive the everyday is an impossible task that creates a very slippery slope of what is worth collecting. Fashion changes so frequently and it is near impossible to know what will have a lasting effect on fashion years from now. But I think it’s worth a shot to try and tell the non-obvious story. It’s my hope that other institutions will see the possibility of looking at the mundane as a means to creating a larger narrative.

I’ll admit, I slacked in my museum visiting duties this week. I haven’t made it to a museum or a gallery because of a variety of reasons, but that’s my fault. So today I want to talk about the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times. Now I’m not talking about the online newspaper, which I love looking at on an almost daily basis. I’m talking about the hard copy of the Sunday paper, what I grew up flipping through in hopes of finding the comic section while my parents read the real news.

In much the same way that I love reading from a real book and flipping physical pages, there is something in me that loves a news print and the way that the ink stains your fingers a little. That’s why when my friend picked up a copy of the New York Times today I instantly tore into the arts and leisure section. What I found, however, frustrated me as a former Art History major.
This Sunday’s Arts and Leisure section was a whopping 22 pages long, five full pages of which were ads for TV programs, theater shows, and music performances. That’s not including all of the ads that take up the extra space on a page with short articles. More frustrating for me was the actual lack of discussion on art. Of the remaining 17 pages, only one full page and a small column article focused on the fine arts. Every other article discusses theater, television shows, and music.

The full page article on art was about Anthony Hernandez, a photographer based in LA who recently became the subject of a retrospective at the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art. While much of the article discusses Hernandez’s art (as it should), what I found most interesting was SFMoMA’s decision to faze out their Photography specific galleries and begin to incorporate that media with painting and sculpture. This is a bold move within the art history (and perhaps even museum world) because photography has always been seen as an art form not quite on the same level as painters and sculptors. Photography was always so drastically different from painting and sculpture that it was never seen as appropriate to combine the medium.

I have never visited SFMoMA but I would absolutely love to see how their collection and display techniques change as they begin to blend photography into the rest of their collection. If done right, this decision could really enhance the art discussion that photography tends to capture the world as it actually is. It offers another dimension to the dialog of art at any given time and will be a huge asset in the understanding of modern art.

But back to the original purpose of this blog post, as interesting as this article was and it’s implications. I was highly disappointed by NYT’s lack of discussion on visual art. I had to flip to the last page of the section to find the article on Hernandez. I understand there is so much more offered online, and maybe this was just an odd week, but I want at least a slightly more equal use of print among the arts. The NYT discusses art all over the country (and there are definitely more than just two artists worth noting this week), so why is there really only one page devoted to such a discussion? Maybe next week will be different, but I, like so many millennials, will probably just look online.

Since moving to DC I’ve made it my goal to see as many museums as possible. Generally speaking, I’ve seen around 1 museum a week which isn’t too bad because it keeps me in touch with the museum culture here without burning out. What I have begun to notice, however, is that many of the museums I’ve visited recently have been a “typical” museum. They look like a classical building, meaning Greco-Roman influence, and inside the galleries are what you would find in any museum anywhere in the world. This isn’t a jab at DC museums, at least the Smithsonian’s, because these are 19th century structures and it’s always difficult to break with what has become the museum standard (especially in the nation’s capital city). But I have started to crave something innovative and different from that “typical” museum visit.

This is why I was so excited when I got the opportunity to visit Forced From Home this past Wednesday for my class on Museum History and Theory. This visit was entirely unexpected and in many ways that made it all the more exciting. The original plan was to see a few exhibitions inside the National Museum of American History and dissect what museum practices and innovations we had just read about were taking place. Instead of heading inside to the museum, my professor mentioned that she had heard of this exhibition being put on by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and had snagged 10 tickets for noon that day. Unfortunately this meant that about five students in the class wouldn’t be able to see Forced From Home that day and would have to stick to the original plan. I had heard about Forced From Home from one of my classmates in my Digital Technology class and instantly jumped at the chance to see how it played out on the National Mall.

Forced From Home follows the path that refugees, internally displaced people, and those seeking asylum must travel to reach a MSF facility. It’s an exhibition that is traveling to five cities over the course of 2016 and definitely worth checking out if it’s in your area. Unlike most traveling exhibitions, this one is outside and, for the most part, uncovered. I was lucky that it was a beautiful day when I had my experience there, but our tour guide did say that they still give tours when the weather isn’t so great. I can only imagine how drastically different that visit must be from my own.

How does it work? Well first you get your entry “ticket” which is really an ID card with a country of origin and your status. I was a Refugee from Burundi. Next we sat down and were given some of the basic information about what MSF does all around the world. Our guide for this experience was a registered nurse from Canada who had been stationed over seas three times with MSF and was using her vacation time to work this exhibition. She asked our class what brought us in today, and I almost wish she hadn’t. We told her we were museum studies students and she said she would try to cater her tour to our interests. I was looking for a truly authentic experience on this visit, so having her alter her normal tour for us didn’t sound too appealing to me. And it turns out, my experience seemed largely shaped by that one admission.

After our initial discussion we moved into this 360 degree video room. The video truly brought to life what it would feel like in a variety of refugee camps around the world as well as meet people living in those camps. It was definitely a great use of technology and had the capacity to hold many more than our 11 person group. The video was about 5 minutes long and was the only video or technology piece in the entire fifty minute tour.

Once we were outside again we were asked to stand in front of pillars that had the names of the countries on our ID cards. We were then asked to go behind the pillar and grab 5 cards that represented the 5 items we would take with us. I grabbed water, clothes, shoes, blankets, and my passport. We were then told to get into a boat and hand over one of our items. This would become a theme at each of the stops on our tour.

Plastic cards with items commonly taken by people fleeing their homes

At each stop we were told that most of the items around us were actually taken from the field and in many ways that made the experience more visceral. We saw things like life vests that weren’t suitable for open sea travel, abandoned toys, water containment systems, and a camp bathroom. The objects used throughout the exhibition were powerful because they were worn and clearly had a history beyond their placement in the exhibition.

Toys and tools taken from the field

Table filled with food and wares for sale along the refugee route

I learned so much information about what MSF did for people, but in many ways I didn’t learn exactly what it was like for the people I was meant to identify with. I think this is because our tour guide knew we were museum studies students. Instead of treating us like normal visitors our tour guide would say “for our average visitor I like to…” and would explain how the experience would typically go rather than allowing us to participate like any other visitor. I think I felt this way because of the tour guide behind us with another group. They running around and the guide was shouting at them to hurry and hand something other whereas everything we did was calm and collected. I wanted to be experiencing a tour like that, something fully immersive.

I appreciated that our guide spoke to us as equals and tried to give us insight into how MSF thought about their tour process, but sometimes, the best way to learn about something is to just jump in head first. To spend less time explaining and more time experiencing.

For my Museums and Digital Technology class, not only are we meant to keep our own blogs but we are also encouraged to read our classmates posts. I follow some of my classmates on their various blog formats and therefore I received an email saying that Erica Daudelin had updated her blog and I went to go and read it. Erica’s post this week discusses Augmented Reality at the Royal Ontario Museum, which is really cool and you should go and read about it here. Erica’s post got me thinking, however, about what else is out that that could be beneficial to a museum visit that enables visitors to contextualize works better.

More often than not, when I go to a museum I have this incredible urge to touch everything and that goes against all my years of museum visits and what I continually preached as a museum docent over the summer. Perhaps that’s my desire to know more about objects that are so heavily protected I can’t even see the finer details of the object. There is so much to learn about an object that cannot be understood from a distance and requires closer contact. It is one thing to look at an object and read what its purpose was but it is another entirely to hold an object, feel its weight, or even smell it.

Smell is something that isn’t really thought about during a museum visit but smell is so important to memory making and contextualization. I know that every time I walk by someone smoking a cigar, or I smell some butterscotch, I immediately think back to my grandfather’s old house, a place I haven’t been in fifteen years. Now think about the last time you were in a museum, was there any smell that connected you to a different time or place? The answer is most likely no, and that is because most of the objects are sitting behind glass cases. Modern museums are built to preserve the objects they house, and more often than not, they remove objects from their original context in the name of that preservation/conservation.

But what if someone could harness the smell of objects, preserve them, and make them reproducible in order to create a truer interaction with those objects? Scientists such as Cecilia Bembibre at University College London are working on cataloging object smells. An online article from Atlas Obscura posted earlier this month discusses Bembibre’s work with preserving smells of “historic locations and objects around England.” The article explains just how Bembibre goes about collecting her smell samples and then runs them through both “a gas chromatographer and mass spectrometer, which [Bembibre] describes as a ‘big nose.’” These two machines enable Bembibre to have a recipe of sorts for recreating the smell in the future.

While there is much about smells that is subjective, this could offer a wonderful opportunity to museums or historic sites. Being able to recreate an exact smell of an object and allow visitors to smell it while still keeping the original artifact safe could offer a new dimension to the standard museum visit. This technology could potentially also offer visitors the chance to connect on a personal level to an object in new ways. There are so many possibilities for this technology in the future, I just hope someone tries to take advantage of it.

When I think about museums, I don’t typically think about all of the digital technology that creates the most memorable experience. There are so many aspects that are taken for granted when the modern visitor enters the museum, or even before they step in the door. Think about your last museum visit, any type of museum will do. How did you know when it opened? Did you look and see what the exhibitions currently were? If you needed tickets, did you buy them in advanced? Its pretty likely you checked the museum’s website for all of these questions. There is already so much information about a museum ready at your fingertips without even entering a physical building. That doesn’t even begin to cover what digital technology is at play once you arrive at the museum. Things like security, climate control, member services, audio guides, Wifi and so much more are influencing how you experience a museum.

In an increasingly digital/technological world, visitors expect a certain level of the present to be incorporated in the “old world” of museum visiting. For many, museums are meant to be a break with the everyday, a way to transport yourself to another world and time. What is the museum’s place in the 21st century if the visitor has the outside world sitting in their back pocket in the form of a cellphone? It is not enough to come to a museum and look at objects through glass because nine times out of ten, that exact object can be seen in HD on a computer in the comfort of your own home. Museums are now tackling how to get visitors truly engaged with the objects lining its walls, even if that means bringing the outside world in.

My most recent experience with digital technology in the museum setting was at my last trip to the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) this past Sunday. I didn’t plan on going to the museum that day, and I definitely wasn’t planning on writing a post about its use of technology throughout the galleries but my class discussion in Museums and Digital Technology this week got me thinking about how museums are embracing, or not, the digital age. More importantly, it got me thinking about if this incorporation of digital technology really enhanced my experience at the Museum of Natural History.

The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the National Museum of Natural History

It had been a very long time since my last visit to NMNH and I wasn’t really sure what they had on display so I first check their website (linked above) to see if this was really the museum I wanted to visit that day and just how late they were open. Already I was experiencing the museum’s first layer of digital technology and interacting with their most obvious digital presence. Upon arrival however, NMNH’s digital presence became a lot subtler.

Throughout the Hall of Human Origins, I encountered signs encouraging me to touch casts and models of different skulls and bones that were found throughout the world. Although not an obvious use of digital technology, some machine had to copy the original bones and then another machine was responsible for fabricating them into a durable material.

As I continued to wander through these galleries I came across a few touch screens that allowed visitors to learn a little more about certain subjects. These screens were not massive of widely advertised; instead they were tucked into the text panels in front of large display cases. They were there as an additional resource if a visitor wanted, but could easily be ignored or overlooked by someone breezing through a gallery.

While I think these touch screens offer an opportunity to learn more, I found some of them frustrating to work with. More often than not, these touch screens were not very reactive and I found myself jabbing my finger at the screen in order to go to a different screen. Instead of being able to easily learn about how lions hunt in the savannah, for example, I spent most of my time figuring out where the screen thought my finger was so I could compensate and click on the information I wanted. Perhaps that comes with being a very well-visited institution that deals with numerous visitors a week. Machines get worn out, touch screens often need to be re-calibrated, or maybe there was something on my fingers that made it hard to recognize on the screen. Whatever it was, the interactive touch screens definitely can aid in enhancing a learning experience (if you can get past the potential frustrations).

Of all the screens and models I walked past during my visit, I never encountered a wait time to use or touch something except in the Hall of Human Origin. Right next to the 3D models of our genetic ancestors were two photo booths that allowed visitors to see what they would look like as one of our ancestors with the option to email the image to yourself after. On two monitors in between the photo booths, images of past visitors rotated on the screens with the most notable facial features super-imposed over the grinning faces of visitors. I must admit, I was curious about what I would look like as an ancient human, so I began to wait in line along with about seven other people. After 5-10 minutes, however, I hadn’t really moved in line and the intrigue had worn off so I went on my way and explored the rest of the museum.

The irony of the only place in the museum encouraging a photograph having a waiting line is not lost on me. Instead of waiting in line to get to touch an object, people are willing to line up to take a picture with what is basically a Snapchat filter. What does that say about us a visitors? The notion of “the selfie” has become so mainstream that having a photo to prove that you went somewhere, rather than just enjoying the experience of being there has altered how we interact with the world around us. Instead of trying to break with this notion of “pics or it didn’t happen” and keep the museum visit about interacting with the objects, it seems that NMNH is trying to embrace the digital age one selfie at a time.

I just can’t help but wonder what this means for the museum purists like myself. Will my preference for the object-based learning and exploration be pushed aside for the addition of photo booths and touch screens that might not work?